Integrated Communication and Sensing for Meeting Automotive Requirements in 5G/6G Connected Vehicles

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) is being discussed in 5G Release 19 and will likely be a critical component of 6G. In this paper we study ISAC for automotive applications. Specifically, we focus on adding sensing capability to a vehicle modem. Such additional capability will increase the value proposition of adding higher bands connectivity to vehicles. We perform a comprehensive study of challenges needed to enable automotive grade sensing in a vehicle modem, and propose solutions to those challenges. We show how cyclic prefix-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (CP-OFDM), which is used for communication, can be combined with novel receive processing to meet (and even exceed) the automotive sensing requirements. Furthermore, we propose a two-stage resource allocation scheme to minimize the overhead needed for sensing. This simplifies the tradeoff between communication and sensing. We also perform system level simulations to quantify the impact of sensing interference on cellular communication. Finally, we carry out measurements to identify antenna placement that can be used for both communications and sensing. Then, we prototype our proposals to demonstrate automotive level sensing using CP-OFDM.